Baked goods and products using baked goods are a staple in the diets of Americans and many other peoples. Breads in particular, and foods that consist in large part of bread, make up a large portion of this market. Examples include hamburgers with a hamburger bun, frankfurters with a frankfurter bun, and pizzas with a bread bottom or crust. Such foods are baked daily by many bakeries and are sold in supermarkets and other retail outlets millions of times every day. Foods with a baked good portion may also be prepared for consumption on the premises at hotels, restaurants, shopping center food courts, and the like.
Different problems may be encountered with the preparation of baked goods and breads at these different locations. In a bakery, preparing many loaves of bread or buns for resale to retailers, there is no customer in the next room waiting for his order, but there is time pressure to bake the goods, wrap them, and ship them to stores or other outlets. In a hotel or a restaurant, smaller amounts of food are prepared. However, once the customer has placed his or her order, there is considerable pressure to prepare the food and serve it. An example may be a pizza. Unlike a loaf of bread or a hamburger bun, a pizza is generally not prepared in advance of the customer's order. Therefore, when a customer at a hotel or a restaurant orders a pizza, the restaurant or hotel is under considerable time pressure to bake and serve the pizza.
It follows that the restaurant or hotel is very interested in assuring that the pizza will be timely prepared. The most difficult part, and perhaps the most important part, of pizza preparation is the bread or crust. There may be as many different types of crusts as there are toppings of pizza, but the crusts all have one thing at least in common: all are made from bread, all the breads contain yeast, and all the crusts are prepared in advance. The pizza will only be as good as the bread from which it is made.
In general, dough is prepared in a bakery from a mixture of ingredients and allowed to rise. Later, the dough may be cut into portions, shaped for use as a pizza crust or other bread product, packaged, and refrigerated or frozen for storage and shipment. In order to make a good pizza, the dough must meet certain standards. The dough must rise a certain amount in order to have an appealing texture, consistency, density, taste, and feel (“mouth”). The pizza or other product made from the bread will not be appealing if the dough does not rise within certain limits. Proofing cabinets are used to properly proof the dough, which means holding the dough at a certain temperature for a period of time in order to allow the dough to rise before baking or cooking. Pizza crusts or other baked goods that do not rise within specified limits may be judged out of tolerance and discarded or made into “seconds,” rather than sold as premium-quality food products.
A proofing cabinet may also be known as a proofing box or a proofing oven. A proofing oven will generally be capable of proofing a bread product, and may also have sufficient heating capability to fully cook the product. One such proofing oven is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,463,940, in which air is recycled from the oven to a dehumidifier outside the oven, heated, adjusted for a humidity level, and then blown back into the oven with a fan. This oven uses baffles or deflectors to insure turbulent air flow throughout the oven. However, the temperature throughout the oven is not uniform, and dough in different areas of the oven will be “proofed” at different temperatures. Therefore, results will depend on the location within the oven of each piece of dough. This is unsatisfactory. Another proofing oven and method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,456,762. This “proofing” oven uses sophisticated microprocessor controls in a conventional kitchen stove that incorporates a fan for better circulation and temperature uniformity. However, this arrangement may only provide a small region in the center of the oven that has sufficient temperature uniformity for satisfactory proofing.
What is needed is a proofing cabinet that has better uniformity of temperature throughout the cabinet, and wherein the cabinet is sufficiently large that a plurality of goods may be proofed at once.